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Thursday, January 16, 2014

Treasury Department Tests Alcohol Products

Alcohol is big business, and the United States has one of the largest alcohol industries in the world. Interestingly, the United States is the only country in the world that has an alcohol-regulating body located in its Treasury Department.

The Treasury Department’s alcohol-regulating body is making a list of all beverages containing alcohol sold in stores and online, in order to find which ones need to be tested. This is being done to make sure that alcohol product labels do not mislead consumers, according to The New York Times.

Some of the testing that Treasury Department employees may be doing is somewhat comical, such as testing gold-colored flecks in Goldschlager to determine if they are made from real gold. They may also probe snake wine to see if it has enough liquid to qualify as an actual drink, the article notes.

The Associated Press called the department “a regulator that protects its industry from rules it deems unfair, a tax collector that sometimes cuts its companies a break.”

Daniel Wagner wrote about the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau for the Associated Press last year, saying, “Some of its decisions are open to negotiation. A tequila-like liquor with a scorpion floating in it made scientists balk until the producer convinced them that the scorpions are farm-raised and non-toxic. In other words, this may be the only federal agency that responds favorably to receiving scorpion candy in the mail.”